More by Jean Giono

Jean Giono & Barbara Bray In 1910, while hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness.

Ten years later, after the war, he visits the shepherd again and sees the young forest he has created spreading slowly over the valley. Elzéard’s solitary, silent work continues and the narrator returns year after year to see the miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man’s creative instinct.

Jean Giono « For the character of a human to reveal truly exceptional qualities, one needs to have the good fortune of being able to observe his actions over many years. If his actions are free of all egotism, if his guiding principle is unequalled generosity, if it is absolutely certain that no reward was sought anywhere and his ideas have left a visible impression on the world; one has, without any doubt, found an unforgettable character.
About forty years ago, I went on a long hike, in heights unknown to tourists, in these ancient regions of the Alps which extend to Provence.
This region is bordered to the south and south-east by the central course of the Durance, between Sisteron and Mirabeau; to the north by the upper course of the Drôme, from its source until Die; in the west by the plains of Comtat Venaissin and the foothills of Mont Ventoux. It encompasses the whole northern part of the department of Basses Alpes, the southern part of the department of Drôme, and a small enclave of the department of Vaucluse. ».
The full text is presented with an index. Each of the chapters is illustrated. A dictionary of explanation of the main "difficult" words of the text is also integrated (glossary). It is possible to read or to listen to the texts, each of the chapters offers a music or an acoustic atmosphere of introduction.

Jean Giono, Paul Eprile & Edmund White In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel’s challenge—to express man’s fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece.

Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essai,Melville: A Novel—part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile’s expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle.

Paul Eprile was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation's 2018 Translation Prize for his translation of Melville.

Jean Giono, Paul Eprile & David Abram An NYRB Classics Original

Deep in Provence, a century ago, four stone houses perch on a hillside. Wildness presses in from all sides. Beyond a patchwork of fields, a mass of green threatens to overwhelm the village. The animal world—a miming cat, a malevolent boar—displays a mind of its own.

The four houses have a dozen residents—and then there is Gagou, a mute drifter. Janet, the eldest of the men, is bedridden; he feels snakes writhing in his fingers and speaks in tongues. Even so, all is well until the village fountain suddenly stops running. From this point on, humans and the natural world are locked in a life-and-death struggle. All the elements—fire, water, earth, and air—come into play.

From an early age, Jean Giono roamed the hills of his native Provence. He absorbed oral traditions and, at the same time, devoured the Greek and Roman classics. Hill, his first novel and the first winner of the Prix Brentano, comes fully back to life in Paul Eprile’s poetic translation.

Jean Giono & Jonathan Griffin Perhaps no other of his novels better reveals Giono's perfect balance between lyricism and narrative, description and characterization, the epic and the particular, than The Horseman on the Roof. This novel, which Giono began writing in 1934 and which was published in 1951, expanded and solidified his reputation as one of Europe's most important writers.

This is a novel of adventure, a roman courtois, that tells the story of Angelo, a nobleman who has been forced to leave Italy because of a duel, and is returning to his homeland by way of Provence. But that region is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, travelers are being imprisoned behind barricades, and exposure to the disease is almost certain.

Jean Giono Blue Boy is the fictionalised autobiography of Giono’s boyhood. Much of the story is seen through the eyes of the young Jean, however the novel is written in the lyrical style and language and with the hedonistic and mystical insight which characterise Giono’s greatest works. Sensuousness, the benign figure of Jean’s father, Pere Jean, and an intensely tender and loving regard for human suffering and for the beauties of the world provide a unity of tone and subject matter.

Jean Giono, Edward Ford & Henry Miller The Solitude of Compassion, a collection of short stories never before available in English, won popular acclaim when it was originally published in France in 1932. It tells of small-town life in Provence, drawing on a whole village of fictional characters, often warm and decent, at times immoral and coarse. Giono writes of a friendship forged in a battlefield trench in the midst of World War I; an old man’s discovery of the song of the world; and, in the title story, the not-unrelated feelings of compassion and pity. In these twenty stories, Giono reveals his marvelous storytelling through his vivid images and lyrical prose, whether he is conveying the delicate scents of lavender and pine trees or the smells of damp earth and fresh blood.